A visitor browses your website and clicks on Blog inside your menu. You’ve already arranged that the Blog page lists all of your blog posts in a certain order (reverse chronological order by default). The number of blog posts you’ve written so far can be, let’s say, 100. Awesome! And some of them are quite long and the visitor needs to scroll down several times in order to read the entire post.
Full Post vs Short Summary
When I am viewing a Blog page of a website, I expect it to show me titles with links to blog posts with or without a short summary of the post. If the entire posts are shown inside the Blog page, I won’t be able to take a quick look at the titles and I will probably leave the page immediately if the first post doesn’t catch my attention.
It might just be my point of view but who knows, some of the visitors reading this article might share the same opinion!
All in all, many theme developers also have different thoughts on this subject and because of this, there are themes that display full posts on the Blog page and others show just the title with the link to the article. Examples for the two options are the Bushwick theme which displays just the title of posts and the Fictive theme (which I am using for my own blog) that displays full articles.
If you possess some PHP knowledge combined with the WordPress codex, you can modify some of the theme’s code in order to make your Blog page display only summary of the posts instead of full text.
If you are going to edit the theme’s files, please note that the best practice would be to create a child theme first!
However, there is another, a lot easier way to accomplish this.
Read More Tag
Instead of the full article inside your Blog page, you can insert a tag which will cut the rest of the article and place a link instead, that will link to the full article. This way, you have full control of what is displayed at the Blog page for each of your articles.
Inside the first row of the post editor, take a look at this icon:
This is the Insert Read More Tag. Just click anywhere inside your content where you’d like to insert a link to the rest of your post and then click on this icon. And that’s it. Once you publish/update your post, visit your Blog page and you’ll see a link at the bottom of the summary of your post:
Note: you will not be able to see this link when previewing the post. It will only be visible inside the posts page (the Blog page as we called it inside this article).
The only downside of this method is that you will need to apply it to every single post individually – you cannot do it in bulk. Also, this method can be applied for both WordPress.com and WordPress.org websites! 🙂
